Robert Kirkman Calls The Walking Dead Companion Series ‘Startlingly Different’

Cameras are getting ready to roll on AMC’s upcoming companion series to “The Walking Dead” and EW caught up with series creator Robert Kirkman, who revealed, without too many details, that the series will be quite different from the regular series.

“I will say that this is going to be a show about family,” Kirkman said. “But it’s going to be a show about a different type of family that we haven’t explored in The Walking Dead thus far. So what we’re trying to do with The Walking Dead spinoff is keep the story as familiar as possible for people that love The Walking Dead, so you’ll get the kind of things that you expect from a Walking Dead story. But, at the same time, we’ll want to tell these stories in a completely different way with completely different people in a completely different setting that’s going to make for a fundamentally different show. I think the look and feel of The Walking Dead spinoff is going to be startlingly different.”

Kirkman went on to address the Los Angeles setting, which will provide an interesting contrast to the Atlanta location of the primary series.

“It’s Los Angeles. It’s a corner of the world that we have never explored in the comic book series. So, theoretically, something like this could be happening in Los Angeles in the comic book series, but we don’t show you this area of the country in the comic book series. So it fits within that world, but it is all new characters, all new events and all kinds of crazy stuff.”

Co-created by Kirkman and Dave Erickson, the series will take place in the same zombie apocalypse depicted in “The Walking Dead” albeit in a different location and potentially at a different point in time. Erickson will serve as the showrunner for the new series, which will be executive produced by Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd and David Alpert. Adam Davidson will direct the pilot episode which sees Cliff Curtis will lead the companion series alongside Kim Dickens. They’re joined by Frank Dillane and Alycia Debnam-Carey.